Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

In a ninth century poem translated from Tamil, my father’s mother tongue, a woman desperate to unite with God promises to build and ride a matal– a horse made of palm leaves. The lovelorn in medieval India crafted matal as platforms from which to publicly declare their longing, in hopes of winning their beloved’s affection. The speaker of this poem takes up the matal to beg God to envelop her. 

 Driven by erotic longing for God realization, the speaker declares her conviction: 

My Friend, this I swear:

I shall shock all the earth

I shall do weird deeds

and ride the palmyra stem like a horse.

With no sense of shame, I shall ride

the palmyra stem through every street in town

and women from all the lands will cheer me on.

 From Nammalvar’s Tiruvaymoli 

(translated by Archana Venkatesan)

The speaker is so fed up with the experience of separation that she is willing to assemble palm leaves into a horse, mount it, and cry out for relief in front of everyone she knows. What’s more, she anticipates solidarity. My hair stood on end as I read. I longed to build, ride, and cry out. 

I approach the matal as a DIY technology for exploring longing and pursuing release. 

Working in the Indian tradition of jugaad– the scrappy, inventive and often humorous repurposing of available resources to achieve one’s aims– I improvise with materials and circumstances as they present themselves.

Dumpster refuse and institutional cast-aways become the raw materials for urgent, emotional, engineering. I fashion myself a mount, pile on clay, climb on top, and ride– reaching for what I cannot grasp. A rebar cage on the side of the highway becomes a vehicle to explore frustrated yearning. Christmas trees picked up off the street become a fleet of matals for a group of women experiencing increased precarity under our current political regime–and longing for collective release.